A Florida judge called both Apple and Google's Motorola Mobility out in court, saying that neither of them really wants to resolve these patent matters.

U.S. District Judge Robert Scola -- a federal judge in Miami, Florida -- said that Apple and Motorola Mobility are wasting the court's time with patent infringement lawsuits that they have no intention of solving.

“The parties have no interest in efficiently and expeditiously resolving this dispute; they instead are using this and similar litigation worldwide as a business strategy that appears to have no end,” said Judge Scola. “That is not a proper use of this court.”

Judge Scola's main issue is that Apple and Motorola Mobility currently have over 180 claims regarding 12 patents and are arguing over the meaning of over 100 terms.

“Without a hint of irony, the parties now ask the court to mop up a mess they made by holding a hearing to reduce the size and complexity of the case,” wrote Judge Scola. “The court declines this invitation.”

The court has given Apple and Motorola Mobility four months to narrow the case down, and if they fail to do so, the case will be put on hold until all disputes over terms are resolved.

Apple and Motorola Mobility have been tossing patent infringement lawsuits around since 2010. Many see these cases as a way of struggling for market share and pushing the competitor's products out rather than attempting to solve real issues.

I won't get into whether or not Apple innovated or not. I'm not an Apple fan. But I do think they did help prod the mobile industry along a lot faster than the rate it was progressing at the time. They also made a lot of money also. While I'll admit that Apple helped to give the industry a good kick in the pants and that the industry is now fully moving along, the problem here is that Apple is no longer competitive and the use of Patents to stifle competition is largely Apple's fault in this. Typical Patent trolls are looking for a payout from businesses but what Apple is doing is more to prevent the competition.

This would have been the perfect opportunity for the market to band together to petition congress to have patent reform and to squash actual patent trolls that don't create anything but instead as Apple and MS have done either themselves or through proxies used patents as a business model to be anti-competitive. Because of the their business model, other companies are following the same practice with developing patent portfolios so they can either do the same.

Until the politicians realize that they need to fix this, I don't see how this will get any better as the courts can only recommend but cannot legislate no matter how much of a mess the government has made of this. Hell, even some of the courts have made a mess of it.

It's comical to me to imagine them being instrumental in moving the industry to mobile without a lick of innovation. That itself would be a success story, lmao. The entire industry shifted, other industries shifted, monoliths were cracked..... but not because of anything new. Laughing out loud.

Success is a combination of innovation, functionality, usability, and marketing. Just because a product is successful doesn't necessarily mean it has all of these traits.

Apple is great at marketing (so is Microsoft, though not as much anymore). And they're also exceptional at usability (I'd say probably the best for the average lay person). Innovation is kinda so-so - they do a pretty good job of taking stuff that is already available in industry but hasn't been widely adopted yet, and packaging it into something that's simple for regular people to use. But they didn't necessarily invent the stuff, like Samsung/LG develooped OLEDs, or Seagate increases HDD storage density, or Intel improved 3D lithography. Outside of UI design, Apple is more of a parts assembler than an actual innovator. They're just really smart about which COTS parts they pick for their devices. Functionality is poor - they tend to leave out or cripple features which come standard in competing products.

And it's a bit of a stretch to say Apple were instrumental to moving the industry to mobile. PDAs and multi-function phones were already well-established industries before the iPhone. It was pretty clear by the early 2000s that the two were on a collision course and were going to merge. The early Palm and Blackberries were the initial result (incidentally, HTC originally made a name for itself with its PDAs). Apple just happened to have the first mega-hit after this merger. If they hadn't been around, the LG Prada probably would've been much more successful. And the industry would've rapidly followed to reach where we are today. As LG's Prada and Samsung's internal docs which Judge Koh barred as evidence indicate, many companies had iPhone-like phones in the design phase before the iPhone was ever announced.

A stretch, you say. PalmOS took 10 years to move 30 million units. iOS did 500 million in 5. If you're keeping score, that's roughly a 17:1 ratio. We may need to have a sidebar about the definition of the word "stretch," lol.

Your argument is simply that you wouldn't describe the things Apple has brought to the table using the word "innovation." They uniquely configured 3rd-party components to a distinct design language that got copied 'til kingdom come, but that wasn't innovation, it was just "smart." So smart that an entire "Ultrabook™" segment was created. No innovation, though.

You've already admitted that Apple has introduced unique and superior UI and usability design. But I guess to you an innovation is an invention, and apparently UI designs can't be invented. People laud the ability to use widgets in Android, but Apple invented widgets so I guess innovation has to be some other kind of invention.

I honestly don't like going on and on about this. I really don't want to be that guy. It seems really obvious to me that Apple has in fact innovated some things, but I guess it's difficult for people to admit that given how antagonistic and unlikeable Apple has been. Personally, I tend to prefer facts to feelings.

Konfabulator co-founder Arlo Rose claims to have invented the widget, but the concept emerged years before Konfabulator shipped.

Some claim Apple invented the widget. The company's "Desk Accessories," conceived in 1981 and were small programs that brought useful tools and innovative multitasking to a non-multitasking environment. The whole widget craze was predicted by the CEO of the company that invented it. The CEO was none other than -- wait for it! -- Bill Gates, and the company was, of course, Microsoft Corp.

Lets be very clear that by your ridiculous Apple-hate-fuelled definition of innovation, none of the mobile phone companies have innovated at all over the past 6 years, because for any feature or development you can come up with, I can point to an equivalent functionality on another device.

Or, to be more blunt, you're totally retarded and ignorant to assume that innovation has to lead to a new functionality , instead of a new or novel way to achieve that functionality.

This endless, semantic and ultimately desperate obsession with trying to prove that Apple is or is not innovative completely misses the point. Let's leave the loaded word 'innovative' to one side, as it is clearly a word liable to produce a hissy fit when used in relation to Apple, and instead think about real world technology markets, products, mutations and disruption. The question to ask is what products in any given market were clearly, in hind sight, disruptive, that is products that not only were very successful but ones that changed the market and changed the products in that market to such an extent that one can say that they caused a paradigm shift. Products that caused something new, and something big, to happen.

Looking back, and this is just a a few examples, I can think of a few. Windows was one such product, even though it was built on the back of Mac OS, it was Windows that changed the industry. Netscape and Google search are another couple of products that changed everything in their domain. None of these game changing products came out of the blue, all such products build on what went before, but all such paradigm shifting products rearrange what went before, assemble previously separate components, re-engineer things, to such an extent and in such novel ways that an explosive mutation takes place that ripples out astonishingly rapidly and changes everything that it touches and to which it is related.

What such game changing products have we seen in the 21st century? Facebook I think probably counts as one but what's relevant to the discussion here is that one company has come up with three such mutations in just a decade, and that is of course Apple. They were in chronological order:

iPod and iTunes (which were really a single product) which transformed the music industry.

iPhone and the App Store, which changed both the phone industry and the software industry.

iPad, which created a new global tablet market and which is profoundly changing the PC industry as well as transforming publishing, gaming and education.

So whether one uses the word 'innovation' or not in relation to Apple is neither here nor there. What is indisputable is that Apple, somehow, have triggered a wave of profound change several times in the last few years resulting from products they have released. And these products were released into markets where previously Apple were not present all.

People get too wrapped up in "innovation". In the end, it really doesn't matter that much.

Execution is the key.

Beta predated VHS and was technically superior, but VHS executed better. The rest is history.

Windows OS executed better than Mac OS. And that's why 93% of the worlds desktops run a MS OS.

With regards to MP3 players, Apple was far from the first, but they executed better. Whether anyone wants to claim that's because technical reasons, the scroll wheel, iTunes, or even just because of trendy association and marketing, no one can deny the popularity of the device.

Similarly with the iPhone. Apple hit with the right product at the right time.

Personally, I don't believe Apple has innovated much, but it doesn't really matter in the end.

But keep in mind that argument goes both ways. Samsung has begun to steal much of Apple's thunder by out "Apple'ing" them.